The house hunt, p.21
The House Hunt, page 21
I screamed.
Donovan’s head had shunted violently sideways, his shoulder and torso following a split-second later, as if he’d been blindsided by an onrushing car.
A shout. A roar.
It took me a second to understand that Sam had charged forwards with the kitchen stool out in front of him, ramming into Donovan’s neck and upper body with the metal legs.
Sam was still screaming. Donovan had been spun around on his heels and now he was falling backwards, his upper body slamming down against the stove top, pinned by the legs of the stool, his head mashed up against the tiled splashback.
One of the metal crossbars at the bottom of the stool – the footrest – was crushing his throat.
Sam yelled louder, terrified, out of his depth, and pushed down harder.
Donovan spluttered and tried to rise up but he couldn’t.
He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t shout. His airways were being crushed.
But the knife was still in his hand and it was still dangerous.
He swung the blade towards Sam. Scything at his thigh.
A wet ripping noise as he slashed through Sam’s jeans.
Sam cried out, tipping to one side as Donovan began to swing the knife back the other way.
No.
I released the bottle neck, rushed forwards and made a grab for Donovan’s wrist.
I banged his wrist against the handle of the oven.
Banged it again.
Dug my nails deep into his skin.
I was still holding on, still fighting for the knife with Sam leaning over me and mewling in fear and fright, his feet skidding backwards desperately on the floor as he pressed down even harder on the legs of the stool until Donovan’s hand and arm went gradually floppy, the strength left his body and the knife fell to the ground.
84
I took a step backwards, staring at Donovan.
A ripple of horror made me physically buck.
Donovan’s eyes were closed. The crossbar of the stool was embedded in his throat. His body was limp, his arms splayed at his sides. Blood from his dressing was dripping slowly onto the stove.
‘Sam?’ I whispered.
Sam stumbled as he readjusted his footing. His mouth was gaping. I could see blood staining the fabric of his jeans where he’d been cut on his leg.
He cringed and eased up on the force he was exerting down through the stool, but only by a fraction. He looked scared and horrified by what he’d done.
When Donovan still didn’t move, I swallowed thickly and reached towards his neck, my hand moving slowly, slowly, until my fingers touched his jugular.
His skin was warm and clammy.
He didn’t respond to my touch.
I pushed gently on Sam’s arm with my other hand until he eased off very slightly more on the stool.
A terrifying second.
I gulped as I probed Donovan’s neck, wary of the slightest movement.
A flicker beneath my fingertips. His pulse was sluggish, but there.
I felt a trickle of relief in my stomach mixed with more uncertainty.
Now that I was nearer, I could see the tremor of his pupils beneath his eyelids and, when I raised the back of my hand to his nostrils, a faint exhalation washed against my skin. It reminded me of Bethany. We needed to get to her.
‘I think he’s unconscious,’ I whispered.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I think you can ease off. I think it’s OK.’
Sam looked terrified as he lifted the stool away in shaky increments, poised to stab down with it again if Donovan stirred.
‘It’s OK,’ I said again. ‘He’s not moving.’
Very slowly, Sam lifted the stool clear and set it down sideways on the kitchen island, snatching his hands away from it as if he wished he’d never touched it, but keeping it within reach.
I could see how freaked out he was. There was a wash of tears in his eyes and he was hobbling from the cut to his leg.
When he looked again at Donovan, he seemed equal parts stunned and appalled by his actions.
‘Thank you,’ I told him.
He nodded wordlessly but I could tell he was uncomfortable about it. I could tell he still wasn’t sure about me.
I placed my hand on his back. I could feel the heat coming through his shirt.
‘You saved me,’ I whispered. ‘You did the right thing.’
His hands were loose at his sides. He wasn’t hugging me back.
‘But can you call the police now?’ I asked. ‘For real this time? I have to go up and help Bethany.’
I went to hurry away but Sam reached for my hand, pulling me back.
‘Why did you think there was someone else?’ he asked me, his gaze flitting across my face. ‘Outside. You said you were afraid someone was watching me. You thought they might have followed me home.’
‘Because that’s what he told me. He made me think he was communicating with someone in your support group. He told me they were faking a phobia. But now I think he was lying.’
‘Why?’
I glanced at Donovan again. He still wasn’t moving but I was reluctant to waste more time.
‘Because if he was working with someone else they would have followed us in here. He would have called them for help after I stabbed him. Just like we should be calling the police.’
A tiny line formed between Sam’s eyebrows.
‘What is it?’ I asked him.
He didn’t answer me. His gaze had gone inwards, as if something was niggling at him, a thought he was afraid to voice.
‘Sam, what is it?’
‘There was someone in the group today,’ he said slowly, almost as if he was only now piecing it all together in his mind. ‘She stayed behind with me at the end. I noticed she had a tattoo. Inside her wrist.’
He turned my hand over and showed me, smoothing his fingers over my skin close to my scar.
His fingers felt strangely cold. I didn’t like the haunted look on his face.
‘The tattoo was of a bumblebee.’
‘So?’
‘Her phobia.’ He raised his gaze to the ceiling and closed his eyes briefly, as if he’d overlooked something obvious he should have spotted before now. ‘She told me she suffered from trypanophobia.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Fear of needles. She shouldn’t have had a tattoo.’
And that’s when Sam seized hold of both my arms, spun me around and shoved me hard down the basement steps.
85
Sam
‘I’m sorry,’ Sam told the Lost Girl, jerking a thumb over his shoulder with an apologetic grimace, setting off in the direction of Temple station. ‘But I really have to run to get my Tube. My girlfriend’s expecting me. I need to get home.’
Except he didn’t go home. Not right away. And he didn’t have a girlfriend.
Yet.
He just needed to make his excuses and hurry off from the Lost Girl, then take up a position on the other side of the street, in the doorway to an office block, watching the Athlete and the Artist as his anger and frustration roiled in his gut.
They didn’t know he was watching them. They were too preoccupied with one another. And Sam had become an expert at keeping to the shadows.
The Athlete had his thumbs hooked in the shoulder straps of his backpack. He was several inches taller than the Artist, acting chatty and casual, smiling with his perfectly aligned, perfectly expensive teeth.
The Artist smiled coyly back as she reached into her shoulder bag, removed a glossy flyer and passed it to the Athlete, then studied him with an anxious, pensive expression as he held the flyer between his hands, perusing it carefully before pointing to the photograph on the front with a grin.
The acid burn crept up to Sam’s gullet, raging at the back of his throat.
He could see it was a flyer for the Artist’s interior design business. She used the same graphics and font on her website.
That was how Sam had first found her. Surfing the Web. Hunting for someone with the right potential to help him remodel his grandparents’ place, turn the maximum profit, get everything right.
Her website had featured links to her social feeds. A fledgling Facebook page where she had few followers for her business. Twitter, which she posted to rarely. And Instagram, which she used more often but where she almost never interacted with other accounts.
Soon after that he knew almost everything about her.
Her full name.
Her residential address.
The furniture shop where she worked part-time.
The fact she’d moved to London only eight months before.
She appeared to have next to no contact with any family members. Her parents were deceased. If she had close friends from before she’d relocated to London, they didn’t stay in touch with her online, and if she’d made new friends since, there was no evidence to suggest it. Outside of the handful of clients she was beginning to attract, she’d made barely a ripple in the city. He sensed she was lonely.
Like most people, she had a set routine and that made her easy to follow. And once he started, it was difficult to stop.
He didn’t just like watching her.
He craved it.
But, somehow, she picked up his trace.
She started looking over her shoulder, peering out of her front window late at night, posting even less frequently on Instagram, never on Twitter or Facebook at all.
He knew she hadn’t seen him directly.
He was much too wily for that.
But it was obvious she had a sense of him.
A fear.
Which was perfect, when he thought about it.
Because fears and phobias were one of Sam’s specialisms.
And with a few well-targeted ads for his support group on Instagram, plus several flyers of his own put up at the stop for the bus he knew she took home from work, and the cafe she visited alone, he felt confident he could lure her in.
Persuasion 101.
Advertisers had mastered the same skills. Know your audience and give them what they want. Make your subject see what you want them to see, believe what you want them to believe.
And then, when it had all come together and she’d arrived in the seminar room this afternoon . . .
The rush he’d experienced.
It was hard to articulate.
Harder still to contain.
Because watching her was one thing, but when she’d talked about her fear of being stalked, of having this irrational sense of being watched . . .
It had taken all of his self-discipline, everything he’d rehearsed and learned, not to spring up out of his chair, grab her by her shoulders and shake her, let her know it wasn’t irrational at all.
Because there was someone following her.
He was following her.
And now she’d come to him.
86
Being pushed down the basement stairs was like falling in a dream.
Except when I hit the bottom I didn’t wake up.
My nightmare had only just begun.
I tried to breathe but when I opened my mouth a great sucking fear invaded my chest.
It seemed to suck the basement walls inwards with it.
They hurtled towards me.
The ceiling slammed down.
I shrank into a ball, cradled my head, closed my eyes, pressed my back and upper body against the bare brickwork of the walls at the bottom of the stairs, in the corner of the room.
The tiled floor was gritty. The air was stale.
Thousands and thousands of cubic pounds of stone and earth and brick pressed down on top of me.
I was scared to look out from behind my arms because if I looked I’d see where I was. I’d know I was really down here.
So my brain switched to other priorities, carrying out a quick inventory of my body, finding the points that were flaring in pain.
My knees and elbows. My ankle. My chin. The heels of my hands, wet with blood.
I’d put my hands out in front of me as I’d fallen – they were grazed and skinned – and somehow thinking of that was worse because I could remember how I’d pushed against nothing but air.
Pushed through nothing.
Until I landed with a jolt and all that nothing rushed in at me.
Imagine you’re not here.
Pretend you’re anywhere else.
But I couldn’t do that.
I was incapable of it.
Because the realness of what was happening was inescapable to me.
And that’s when I heard it.
Something rooted deep in the marrow of my innermost fears.
—click.
It was the sound of the bolt on the outside of the door to the basement sliding home.
87
Sam
Sam followed the Athlete and the Artist for the rest of the afternoon, into the early evening.
He couldn’t let it go.
Even though he knew he should have.
Even when he risked being seen.
Which he wasn’t, because he was careful and well practised, and because he maintained his distances, monitored his angles, watched for reflections in windows and mirrors and the glass of passing vehicles.
He didn’t move too quickly or too slowly.
He blended in.
But seeing them together, watching how comfortable they were in each other’s company, how they talked and laughed and confided in each other, how delighted the Artist was to have company, watching them connect, then later stroll into a pub . . .
It savaged him.
More than he’d been prepared for.
More than he could take.
Because he’d lured her to him, for him, not for the Athlete or anyone else.
Plus it was happening too fast.
It shouldn’t be happening this fast.
His whole intention had been to take it slow and careful, build her trust, her reliance on him, not to see her get swept away by some facile trust fund prince.
And then later, inside the pub, when he’d watched from a distant booth and seen the Athlete take her flyer out of his pocket to talk about it again, when she’d used her phone to scroll through some images demonstrating her work, the two of them crouching together over the table to study the screen, their faces almost touching, eyes locking, he began to feel the fear.
That maybe it was too late.
Maybe he’d lost her to him.
Which was clearly unacceptable.
And was why, when they left the pub together a short while later, a little drunk, a little tipsy, he followed them again.
88
I peered out through splayed fingers at the steps leading up to the basement door.
The steps were tall and narrow. Bare timber painted white.
Looking at them, I was engulfed by a powerful sensation of vertigo, but in reverse, as if I was falling endlessly backwards.
As if I’d never stop.
I put my hands out at my sides and clasped the unfinished brickwork around me, deathly cold against my skin.
I was breathing too fast and too shallowly.
The room was starting to spin.
I could still hear the click from the bolt on the outside of the door. It seemed to echo against the basement walls, repeating in my mind.
I realized I was picking at the brickwork with my nail.
Strange.
There was something familiar about my instinct to do that. An odd kind of muscle memory.
My exhaled breath seemed to chill the air in front of me as I looked at where my hands were placed.
In the stark lighting of the basement I could see other scratches on the brickwork. They were faint but they were there. Tiny stripe marks scored into the paint.
Exactly where I was scratching right now.
My heart jackhammered.
There was a choking blockage in my throat.
Then a sob funnelled up inside me and burst out.
An involuntary burp of horror and fear.
Sam pushed you down these steps.
Sam locked the door.
And then a new thought, cascading on from the others.
Sam didn’t call the police.
What if the reason Sam didn’t call the police wasn’t because he didn’t believe you?
What if it was because he didn’t want the police to come?
89
Sam
After the Athlete led the Artist into the modern apartment building in Farringdon, they stepped into a lift together.
They weren’t holding hands but they were standing close to each other and trading secret smiles, the Artist blushing and glancing down as the doors shuddered closed.
A fast uptick in his pulse as Sam swept into the foyer, watching the numbers above the lift climb.
. . . 8 . . .
. . . 9
The lift stopped.
He watched the digital panel, making sure it didn’t change, then he stepped into a second carriage, rode in it to floor ten and took the stairs down a level.
He could hear the party music before he emerged from the stairwell.
It was loud and percussive. A frenzied pop beat.
And when he stuck his head into the hallway, only one apartment door was open, with people milling around in front of it, vaping and chatting, music and light spilling out. Some of them were dressed in white lab coats. Others in blue hospital scrubs.
He pulled back, strategizing, then the lift binged and a group of strangers – students mostly, by the looks of it – rushed out, clutching bags filled with bottles of booze.
‘Whose party is this anyway?’ someone called.
‘Who cares?’ a drunk girl whooped back, thrusting her fists into the air.
There were enough people, he told himself.
There was enough noise.
And most of them sounded drunk.
Besides, he was a young Assistant Professor. It wasn’t totally out of the realms of possibility for him to say he’d been invited if they bumped into each other.
You can do this.
You have to do this.
